Mescaline, between Psychopathology and Phenomenology: Sartre and Experimentation in 1930s France
Gautier Dassonneville
The MIT Press eBooks November 21, 2023 DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14417.003.0006 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Intervention | Mescaline |
| Topics | Mescaline Philosophy of mind |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that the term "bad trip," retrospectively applied to Sartre's February 1935 mescaline experience, anachronistically imposes a psychedelic perspective that did not yet exist. Sartre, injected with mescaline under Daniel Lagache's supervision, experienced nightmarish visions rather than the pleasant ones he expected, and described mescaline as the "incidental cause" of a depression lasting from March 1935 to March 1937. |
Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the undocumented history of mescaline in medical and psychiatric circles in France by reconstructing the scientific context in which Jean-Paul Sartre's famous bad trip took place in February 1935. 1 In this way, we can first consider that the very term "bad trip," sometimes ascribed to the experience retrospectively 2 on the basis of accounts by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in The Prime of Life 3 in 1960 and by Sartre himself in 1970, 4 may connotate a psychedelic perspective that did not exist yet.At that time, the French writer and phi los o pher was in the pro cess of formulating a phenomenological theory on the imagination, which he went on to introduce in The Imagination 5 (1936) and further develop in The Imaginary 6 (1940), when he de cided to have himself injected with mescaline under the supervision of the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache (1903-1972), a former colleague from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) who was then interning at the Sainte-Anne Hospital psychiatric ward.Following these injections, Sartre fell prey to somewhat nightmarish visions, as described by Beauvoir: "He saw umbrella-vultures, skeleton-shoes, monstrous faces; all around him were crawling crabs, octopi, contorted things."7 During the intoxication, the hallucinogen did not produce the pleasant, dreamlike, kaleidoscopic visions that Sartre was expecting.However, it did have an impact on his psyche: he was then haunted by flashbacks from these hallucinations for several months afterward.Mescaline, according to Sartre, was the "incidental cause" 8 that sent him into a fit of depression that lasted from March 1935 to March 1937.Influenced by his research into psychopathology, Sartre
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on mescaline, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schizophrenia: A New Approach. II. Result of a Year's Research | 1954 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Thought insertion as a self-disturbance: An integration of predictive coding and phenomenological approaches | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Entactogens: How the Name for a Novel Class of Psychoactive Agents Originated | 2022 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Steric and Electronic Relationships among Some Hallucinogenic Compounds | 1970 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| EFFECT OF DRUGS One individual | 1952 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | n = 1 |